The need to connect wirelessly to our electronic gadgets and devices is becoming pervasive and will only increase as we move closer to realizing the internet of things, smart homes, and smart cities. However, the cost and complexity of adding active radio transmitters to toys, simple electronics, and appliances is prohibitive and limits many creative and interactive experiences.
One of the easiest ways of adding wireless communication capability to an object is sticking an RFID tag on it. While this is effective, the cost is not negligible as secure tags cost over ˜23 cents plus encoding fees, which make a significant portion of the BOM for low-end toys. Furthermore RFID tags are fixed function devices that can only report their ID and cannot send arbitrary data.
It is against this background that the techniques described herein have been developed.